Category: Media/Culture

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last three weeks or so debunking a variety of spurious claims about online porn. Amanda Platell claimed to have watched a child porn video she found using Google, but that proved to be an old commercial porn video in […]

Warning: May contain actual evidence. Three weeks ago, I published a couple of articles in the space of two days that conclusively debunked Amanda Platell’s claim that it was easy to find child pornography online using nothing more than Google proving, first, that a porn video she described […]

The latest newspaper to jump on the burgeoning anti-porn bandwagon is the Sunday Times, which recently put its name to a “symposium” on the “dangers to children of online pornography” in conjunction with the Tory Think-tank Policy Exchange: The Sunday Times is organising a symposium on the dangers […]

Having parked its [septic] tanks on Google’s lawn, the media’s efforts to generate a full blown moral panic around the existence of online pornography continued this morning with an appearance on the BBC’s Breakfast News programme by Susie Hargreaves, tbe current CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation. To […]

In the wake of the convictions of Stuart Hazell and Mark Bridger for sexually motivated murders of children, the papers are awash with speculative commentaries on online child pornography. The Daily Mail (of course) wants to know ‘What WILL it take for Google to block child porn?’ even […]

Yesterday I provided what I believe to be conclusive evidence that a ‘child porn’ video that Amanda Platell claims to have viewed as ‘research’ for an article published online by the Daily Mail on 24th May 2012 and as a double-page spread (pp18-19) in the print edition of […]

Note: I don’t usually do content warnings but I have tagged this post as ‘NSFW’ – ‘Not Safe For Work’ – because of it’s textual content which includes a fairly frank commentary on pornography and, in particular, on a legally produced and marketed commercial porn video, dating from […]

For this article I’m going to return to a subject I covered yesterday, that of ‘porn statistics’ or, to be more precise, statistics published widely on both the internet and by newspapers and other media organisation which purport to show that large numbers of children and young people […]

The Daily Mail are back on the trail of mandatory internet porn blocking, courtesy of a survey by the National Association of Head Teachers which claims that 90% of parents want a default setting on computers and smartphones which prevents the viewing of adult material. And at the […]

Ahead of today’s House of Commons debate on the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill and the raft of wrecking amendments tabled, for the most part, by Tory MPs, I think that it’s well worth reflecting on exactly where opposition to equal marriage is coming from and, particularly, how that […]